Some allegations are already emerging that they're inflating reported volumes: Bitcoin(dot)com Crypto Exchange Posts Dishonest Volumes

Sharing order books is fine, but reporting the volume of other exchanges (HitBTC and others) as their own? That's pretty sketchy.

Cool beans. Too bad Andrew Yang is polling at a dismal 3% right now. Up against Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders I just can't imagine him winning, especially on a platform like UBI.

Trump may have seemed like a long shot in 2015, but he was already polling at 30% by this time.

Has the issue of the repatriated remains been solved? I searched around a bit and this is the last media discussion of the body I can find. Unless some additional evidence has surfaced, I'm not convinced that Cotten is dead.

The fact that the exchange's funds were spread around to different third parties -- probably with fraudulent documentation -- tells me that even identifying all the bitcoins involved would be very difficult. The mystical QuadrigaCX cold wallet probably isn't the only piece in this puzzle.

From what I can gather, SB1025 is just reaffirming an Executive Order that Trump already signed into law last year:

The comparisons to Bitcoin seem pretty outlandish. Those legal standards -- "issued by, for, or on behalf of" sanctioned persons -- are not one-size-fits-all.

And it doesn't work on darknet markets, which clearly aren't going away. DNM vendors need to accept bitcoin because it's what customers demand vs. privacy coins. As for fiat money, it doesn't carry much value on the dark web.

I don't think the BTC-e seizure went at all like the US government was hoping. In many ways, it was an embarrassment. They weren't able to seize any funds up front, arresting Vinnik netted absolutely nothing, and BTC-e reemerged a month or so later. That experience probably showed the DOJ how difficult it is to target crypto services who are scattered across many borders, and who employ proper operational security. I believe the US government has wanted to take down Bitfinex for years -- the DOJ and CFTC have been investigating them since at least 2017 and probably earlier. That they haven't suggests that they can't, at least not yet.

Targeting mixers (who don't even touch fiat money) is even more problematic for governments. An honest mixer can easily recover from authorities shutting down clearnet domains or seizing servers. New infrastructure can be built within days and proper encryption would protect all customer funds in the meantime.

But the Bestmixer case -- and subsequent disappearance of BitBlender -- highlights the biggest problem for us: Law enforcement temporarily shutting down a mixer creates an opportunity for them to exit scam.

Bitstamp serves Americans, but I've seen numerous complaints recently about frozen/closed accounts and invasive KYC measures. I probably wouldn't use them to cash out bitcoins.

There are a few other options besides Coinbase and Gemini. Kraken is probably the next most popular option, and bitFlyer has a licensed US exchange now too. Another option is itBit, operated by Paxos. Bittrex also has a USD market now and supports USD withdrawals, but if you don't have an account yet you may need to submit a request to have deposit/withdraw capabilities added to your account.

Maybe really big fish like Galaxy Digital. They are a New York based hedge fund, so they might "maintain custody or control of virtual currency on behalf of others" under BitLicense regulations. Documents uncovered in this investigation could reveal incriminating evidence about businesses like that.

In general, I don't think their mission here is to come after US citizens. It's to come after Tether and Bitfinex. Further, they have no jurisdiction over anyone who is not a New York resident or does not conduct business in New York.

You did it last year, right? How did it go? You might consider sending them a support message to confirm the process still works the same way.

It sounds like you should really consider backing up your 2FA codes. Losing a phone shouldn't cause you to lose access to your accounts. When I enable 2FA, I put the code in at least 2 devices and then keep a paper copy in case of hardware failure.

Malicious exit nodes mounting MITM attacks is a vector I hadn't considered before. I had been thinking of them mainly as surveillance adversaries. I'm not actually sure this is a legitimate concern, though. It seems like attackers could do more effective analysis on regular clearnet usage to mount more effective generalized attacks on a bigger population.

Maybe DaveF could elaborate on how targeted routing analysis would make such attacks more likely. My initial reaction is that users running NoScript and/or disabling JS should be much better protected against MITM attacks than average web users too, so that's another reason why average TOR browser users should be safer.

This sounds extremely dubious. From everything the firm is saying, all of this hinges on a future law enforcement investigation, with the involvement of multiple agencies across borders.

And in the unlikely event of recovery, they'll pocket 3/4 of your bitcoins.

It's pretty insulting. If anything, TOR users are safer on average because of NoScript, which protects against XSS attacks among other things.


Is that why they're so uptight -- because of the hosted wallet? I'd love it if there were a Craigslist style non-custodial trading site with LBC's amount of traffic. I could see it being tough to split their brand at this point, though.

You may be thinking of Coinb.in. They have a time locked address tool. I haven't inspected the code myself but it's open source and can be reviewed on Github. If you decide to use it, I would download and run it offline in a secure environment rather than using the web-based version.

I doubt Bobby Lee is out to scam anyone -- doesn't mean I trust his company to generate my keys.

It's such a silly model. What if the key generation process is compromised? It's a glorified paper wallet so best case scenario, you've got a $40 paper weight. Worst case scenario, your bitcoins are gone. Not to mention if it's ever physically compromised, it's incredibly easy for someone to recover your bitcoins.

Too much emphasis on ease of use at the cost of security is bad for the ecosystem.

It's still pretty impressive considered the network was bootstrapped from a single user.


This has to be an important distinction to make. When people are polled about whether they own bitcoins, surely they are including their exchange accounts. Sadly, I would venture to guess a majority of investors store coins on exchanges.

I still think stats like "20% of people in Turkey" are totally bogus. Those poll results couldn't be duplicated using a representative sample.

Is there any historical data on this stuff? Probably not. I guess 10% didn't seem that unreasonable to me.

The CEO of Babel Finance -- who apparently brokers OTC deals and works with pools like F2Pool -- claims that buyers are paying "as much as a 20 percent markup."


It's risky if you're trying to quickly procure lots of bitcoins. In percentage terms, you may be right, but these buyers (like all OTC buyers) are trying to buy big lots all at once.

It's not Cointelegraph. I've heard about this phenomenon for at least a few years. There are/were services like Mint that would procure virgin bitcoins for a premium.

Investing in a mining operation is risky, and mining has a time cost vs. buying OTC. They could end up losing more than 10% taking that route.

Paying that premium seems crazy to people like us of course, but I get why some investors would do it: They can afford to, and the 10% premium is nothing to them vs. the potential headache if they end up with questionably sourced bitcoins from the OTC market.

I doubt bitcoin remittances represent a significant portion of that 1.2%. Plus, those are remittances received. Remittances received in any fashion are a boost for their economy. Burundi commits barely any spending towards AML regimes as it is, so I don't think that's their primary concern.

I think the government just received lots of complaints from scammed investors and they figured this was the cheapest, fastest way to address it.

Most people are just sending it between exchange accounts anyway, so full node security is a moot point. ETH is still highly secure from the perspective of POW, which is why everyone is still building on it.

Imagine relying on TRON or EOS to secure hundreds of millions of $ in value.

It probably had more to do with Bitfinex losing $850 million to a law enforcement seizure. Bitfinex was insolvent and desperate to fulfill its fiat obligations, so they turned to Tether for a loan. Tether obliged because both companies are run by the same people, after all. That's why their terms were changed -- to account for the gaping hole in their balance sheet.